So I have a vSphere cluster in our production environment that I need to upgrade and I have been reading the docs. I’m hoping I can bounce some ideas off you guys.
We have one IBM bladecenter with 4 blades and a 10 Gb SAN for our shared storage. As for as software we have a Windows 2k8R2 running vCenter with the SQL Express db. We also have ESXi 5.0 on our hosts. We also have no internet to these servers, they are on a separate cut off subnet. I think I have the the vCenter upgrade worked out, I’m just not sure if there is anything I need to do to the SQL Express db using the simple install. My big question is on the hosts.
The hosts are HS22V IBM blades with no hard disk, we’re booting off the internal USB so clearly I’m going to have to make sure there is enough space on /boot. The upgrade doc said 350 mb. The other thing the doc said that bothers me this:
“If a SAN is connected to the host, detach the fibre before continuing with the upgrade or migration. Do not disable HBA cards in the BIOS.”
Now this doesn’t make sense to me. How do people do in place upgrades on their cluster, because that’s production I can’t bring that down. My blades don’t connect to the SAN directly the Bladecenter chassis does.
Should I be doing an interactive upgrade as recommended? Wouldn’t I need an outside connection for that? Or maybe I should be doing an interactive upgrade since it so few hosts? Or maybe I can remove each host, do a fresh install, and read to the cluster?
What would you guys recommend?